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    One Day I Will Write About This Place
    One Day I Will Write About This Place
    One Day I Will Write About This Place
    Audiobook10 hours

    One Day I Will Write About This Place

    Written by Binyavanga Wainaina

    Narrated by Ivanno Jeremiah

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his middle-class Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him. Here he takes us through his chaotic school days, his attempt to study in South Africa, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya. The landscape in front of him always claims his main attention, but he also evokes the shifting political scene that unsettles his views on family, tribe, and nationhood.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateAug 1, 2012
    ISBN9781471211300
    One Day I Will Write About This Place

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    Reviews for One Day I Will Write About This Place

    4/5

    51 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Binyavanga is a boy who seems a bit out of step with his family's ordered, prosperous life in Nakuru, Kenya. He observes the world in vivid snatches and his memoir is written in a similar way. It is a bit hard to dive into, but I found it very vivid and engaging once I got a grip on what he is doing. Kenya is a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic country in which most people's views of Africa and the world come mediated through community myths and ideas about the "other." The author does an excellent job of recreating the way in which a child, and then a young man, pieces observations and received ideas together, trying to make sense of the world. As he travels around Africa, Binyavanga develops his view of Kenya, clarifying the aspects that make his country African and yet distinctly Kenyan. The imagery is dazzling and the many vignettes are memorable. The look straight into the heart of tribal prejudice is perhaps more honest than the author is even aware. His views, for example of the Maasai people he interacts with at his father's leased land, his own easy acceptance of privilege and material wealth, even the description by numerous reviewers of Binyavanga's family as "middle-class" in a country in which electricity, television, automobiles, running water and elite prep schools are the provenance of the wealthy and privileged and "middle class" is really a meaningless term, are a telling revelation of modern Kenya.
    • 4/5
      In a style of writing that I cannot but call absorbing, Wainaina talks about growing up in Kenya in the 70s and 80s, his addiction to fiction, about his booze- and cigarette-fueled attempts at studying in South Africa, about his early days as a writer, about his travels around the continent and the world. Over the course of his personal story, he adds in just enough politics and historical background to keep things firmly in memoir territory (as opposed to general history or international relations). Some of the chapters were published as magazine articles before, and much of the book reads like that: a skilled writer using personal stories to talk about his world of intertribal distrust, colonial legacies, hesitant African democracies, Lagos cityscapes, Togo markets, and how to chart Kenya’s development through a succession of music styles. The best vignettes in the book, though, are the personal ones: this is where Wainaina’s less-is-more writing style does its most evocative work; his sparse sentences and carefully picked details are more artificial and less effective when it comes to more general topics. That said, One day I will write about this place was an immersive read that I was eager to pick up and looking forward to read. I would very much like to read more by Wainaina.
    • 3/5
      Binyavanga Wainaina tells the story of his middle-class Kenyan childhood, his failed attempt to study in South Africa as a computer programmer, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya. There is a lot of turmoil and trouble. He does a very good job of creating word pictures.
    • 4/5
      157/2020. Interesting content but too overwritten for an enjoyable read. I didn't even need to look at the spine to guess this was published by Granta.The author aims a pre-emptive strike at readers like me and misses by a country mile, lol: "After a couple of hours, I am starting to get uncomfortable at the levels of pleasure around me. I want to go back to my cheap motel room and read a book full of realism and stingy prose. Coetzee maybe? That will makes me a Protestant again. Naipaul. Something mean-spirited and bracing."Content: 4Style: 3Average: 3.5
    • 4/5
      This is a memoir written in spectacularly descriptive and creative language that works best in describing scenes and the African world, less well in engaging the reader personally with the writer.
    • 4/5
      I received this as a First Reads winner and am so sorry it took me so long to read and review the book.This is a great book! The descriptions of the people and places of Africa are incredible. Several times I thought I might check Google Earth to find some of the places mentioned because I wanted to see for myself. Then I thought that the descriptions in the book were so detailed I would probably be disappointed by the Google Earth view and decided to just savor the imagery as given.
    • 4/5
      It took me a while to get into this book. For the first seventy-five pages, I just could not make myself care about Wainaina's life. Fortunately, my interest in the book improved the further I read. Wainaina's young adult years provide the forefront for most of his memoir, with the movements and events in Africa during the 1970s and '80s being a fascinating backdrop. The author provides readers with a younger voice's view of the post-colonial continent and all of its competing elements: pop culture vs. Pentecostal religion, socio-political problems, tribalism, Afrocentrism and pan-Africanism, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, Western education, refugees, immigration, and more. Wainaina primarily focuses on his period of being out-of-touch with his goals, country, and, at times, family, then moves on to his eventual journey to being a writer. He ends, however, by writing just as much about recent political situations in Kenya as about himself.Wainaina writes in what I would consider a literary style, so the writing can be lyrical and magnificent at times. I could tell that the words the author used were considered very carefully as he was writing; Wainaina's hard work shows. Every once in a while, though, I found his anecdotes to be somewhat confusing, their meanings ambiguous. I felt like more concrete memoir-writing might have been nice in these places, but all in all, this book turned out to be a wonderful read.